Chapman students should wear student IDs

Every morning from 7-7:55, students enter freely from the student and back parking lot doors. These doors remain unlocked and free to enter at almost any time. So how come this is considered “safe” with a history of school shootings all over America.? How can we fix this safety risk? By requiring students to wear IDs. Wearing the tags has three major benefits for the school: student identification, a permanent pass, and increased safety. 

Let’s start with student identification, IDs will have certain features on them like the student’s name, and lunch code. So when students go to do certain things like check out library books and textbooks, they can just get a barcode scanned on their ID. This will make simple tasks easier and faster. The same thing could be said about getting lunch. Instead of having to remember a lunch number and enter the code every day, students can instead scan their tags once again. 

What else could these IDs help with? What about annoying hall passes? Every day during Flex, we see students go to various meetings for various different clubs in the school. Some of these include Interact, art club, debate, and musical groups. Whenever these clubs decide to come together, the teacher has to either email all the teachers, or hand write every single pass. This could be changed if on the back of student IDs, we printed what clubs they were in. This way they could just show their tag to the hall monitors during flex any time it is needed.

However, the biggest benefit of having student identification tags is increased safety. In the past ten years, there have been over 180 school shootings in the US. All of these perpetrators come through already unlocked doors, so how come someone could just walk into Chapman in the morning with no hesitation? The doors to the student parking lot remain unlocked from 7-7:55 allowing anyone in. If students were required to wear IDs, then they would have to show them before entering the building, proving that they actually go here. This could restrict the building to only those who are allowed to be in Chapman, providing a safer environment for all students and facilities.

Overall, Chapman requiring these tags would have many major benefits. From student identification, and a permanent pass, to increased safety, why wouldn’t we choose to have them for our campus?